This invention relates generally to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a non-destructive method for the analysis of materials, and provides medical imaging. It is generally non-invasive and does not involve ionizing radiation. In very general terms, nuclear magnetic moments are excited at specific spin precession frequencies which are proportional to the local magnetic field. The radio-frequency signals resulting from the precession of these spins are received using pickup coils. By manipulating the magnetic fields, an array of signals is provided representing different regions of the volume. These are combined to produce a volumetric image of the nuclear spin density of the body.
MRI is based on nuclear spins, which can be viewed as vectors in a three-dimensional space. During an MRI process, each nuclear spin responds to four different effects: precession about the main magnetic field, nutation about an axis perpendicular to the main field, and both transverse and longitudinal relaxation. In steady-state MRI processes, a combination of these effects occurs periodically.
Compared with other modalities, such as X-ray, CT and ultrasound, MRI takes longer time, sometimes several minutes, for data acquisition to generate clinically useful images. Undesirable imaging artifacts may appear due to the long scan time. MRI using multiple receiving coils (phased array) has been introduced to shorten the scan time and increase signal to noise ratio (SNR). This fast imaging technique, known as parallel imaging (PI), can significantly accelerate data acquisition, and therefore reduce imaging artifacts and improve image quality.
Parallel imaging uses multiple channels and multiple receiver coils that each receives signals from a subset of the total volume and combines data of the multiple receiver coils to provide an image for a total volume.
Parallel imaging methods exploit the sensitivity of the receiver coils to accelerate MRI acquisitions. SENSE based reconstructions, as described in Pruessmann et al., “Advances in sensitivity encoding with arbitrary k-space trajectories,” MRM 46(4):638-51 (2001), provide a complete general reconstruction from arbitrary k-space sampling. SENSE attempts to reconstruct the imaged object exactly, with no coil sensitivity weighting. To do so, it requires an accurate explicit measurement of the coil sensitivities. The GRAPPA based reconstructions, as described in Griswold et al, “Generalized autocalibrating partially parallel acquisitions (GRAPPA),” MRM 47(6):1202-10 (2002), are becoming increasingly more popular. GRAPPA type reconstructions do not attempt to reconstruct the exact original object. Instead, they attempt to reconstruct each coil image separately—a significantly relaxed requirement. Therefore it requires only implicit coil sensitivity information in the form of correlations between pixels in k-space. The correlation measurements are obtained by calibration.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,841,998 by Griswold, issued Jan. 11, 2005 entitled “Magnetic Resonance Imaging Method And Apparatus Employing Partial And Parallel Acquisition, Wherein Each Coil Produces A Complete K-Space Datasheet,” which is incorporated herein by reference for all purposes, also describes a GRAPPA based reconstruction. U.S. Pat. No. 7,688,068 by Beatty, issued Mar. 30, 2010, entitled “System and Method For Using Parallel Imaging With Compressed Sensing, which is incorporated herein by reference for all purposes,” discloses a parallel imaging system, which uses compressed sensing techniques to reconstruct an MR image.